The British Landscape tradition has always fascinated me.  Throughout its tradition the majority of landscape painting has looked representational and true to life, but it is not.  Instead, it is what the artist perceives or wants it to be thus past landscape artists have manipulated our perception of the term ‘landscape’.  If we were to imagine the term landscape, we are more likely to think of Constable’s interpretation, rather than what is naturally there.  Therefore, rather than painting what I want the landscape to be, I am trying to expose it for it actually is.  I enjoy this ambiguity.  I take sensuous macro elements from natural forms from nature that the everyday rambler would not notice and combine and enlarge them either through photographic and digital techniques to recreate flora and fauna in a partially fractured abstract form or through painting and mixed media to create strong, brightly coloured images.  The natural forms and textures I use are from the British landscape today, either a husk or leaf I find walking, or an exotic flower or vegetable which symbolises the gardening tradition and how we have manipulated, changed and imported the current landscape.   I am currently exploring microscopic forms in more depth, and the patterns, which are reflected on all scales of a natural object.  I am achieving this by layering images on canvas, doing delicate drawings of patterns on a translucent layer over my paintings.  This process creates new and different forms that hint at the source but produce imagery that is using the landscape tradition in an entirely new way. These images are meant to distort our ideas of the landscape – they ‘look’ natural but obviously not true to life, that is why I concentrate on the macro and microscopic elements of the landscape.  This is a metaphor for the landscape, it looks ‘real’ and natural, yet how many forests have equidistantly spaced trees? – They look real but have been planted by man.  I firmly believe in the theory of Gaia, that the world is an organism, and it doesn’t matter what destruction man causes, nature will prevail.  Species may be lost, rainforests destroyed and oceans polluted but Gaia will recover and survive.  I do not believe man is trying preserve his surroundings, but merely himself and the living to which he has become accustomed.  For example, there is a current concern in the media in Britain regarding cars and carbon emissions and ‘footprints’ however there is some recent research that mentions that carbon emissions are not affecting the ozone layer.  During the Victorian era most cities were black because of the amount of coal that was being burnt due to the steam era, yet nature adapted.  There is a moth that camouflages itself on silver birches that has evolved itself over many generations from silver to black, because the silver trees were black from the coal.  The silver birches are now becoming silver again, because of the cleaner fuels cities are burning but the moth remains black and vulnerable.  Perhaps man isn’t concerned about the environment but the drive to find a renewable source of fuel rather than a finite one, otherwise modern lives and economies will change substantially.